


If Not Later, When

by lq_traintracks (lumosed_quill)



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, POV First Person, mentions of anal sex, mentions of oral sex, nonlinear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-05 22:11:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15180458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumosed_quill/pseuds/lq_traintracks
Summary: “They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying,You could have had this instead.” ~André Aciman,Call Me By Your Name





	If Not Later, When

**Author's Note:**

> This refers to both book and film canon, so if you’ve seen the film but not read the book and don’t want to be spoiled for the differences in endings, this may not be the story for you. There is time jumping, between Elio at 18 in the summer of 1984 (the summer after Oliver stayed with them), and then Elio and Oliver 20 years after that first summer (but not actually in the same universe, if that makes sense). I wanted to address movie canon for what it is, as time frozen about three-quarters of the way through book canon, and then address book canon on its own terms as well. The book talks about ‘parallel lives’ in a figurative sense, and I wanted to make that somewhat literal here. Also, I used an asterix ( * ) after passages quoted directly from the book and thereby written by André Aciman himself, barring a couple of lines of brief dialogue from the book as well.
> 
> Thank you a million times to bixgirl1 for reading this over for me! <3

**The Summer After, 1984**

I resituate the headphones over my ears, blocking out some of the cicada hum that has filtered in like water, unstopped by seams. The hum adds something though, new notes, deep-throated. Like monks chanting in morning fog. Or breath turned to sound through the body of a bassoon. The thought brings a smile, and my lips actually part to say it aloud: Cicadas are nature’s woodwinds. But then I stop.

Back in B. Of course. Where else? The summer swims by as lazy as always, nearly drowning. It’s even slower than usual, with father intent in his study and my mother working a jigsaw puzzle monotonously to completion. Mafalda hasn’t even yet banged a pan into a pot or slotted a knife into a melon rind. We haven’t begun to move my things out of my room and into the other; it’s not time for the new one to show up. 

I didn’t choose this time, didn’t offer to. She’s from Fresno, will be already adapted to the stillness of the heat. Thesis on… I can’t remember. My memory contains only Brahms and Haydn, last year’s transcription of _The Seven Last Words of Christ_ —although to be fair, there are probably only a metaphorical three words left in my brain.

I get more comfortable on the blanket I laid out over the grass, an arm under my head and eyes closed to let in more sound. I scratch my stomach, fingers under my loose t-shirt. It’s my shirt I’m wearing. Billowy has to go into the laundry at some point, after all.

Just like that, the music mutes. My fingers brush my skin, alleviate the itch, and yet in my mind, it remains. He remains.

It’s been a year since he absconded with my memory. All before him has blurred and all after is blue cotton floating on a line in the sun. I’m left with the reverberation of his voice.

My memories are now:

The talk my father and I had.

The Piave memorial.

The slate wall in Rome.

All of it Oliver.

He’s married now. He would be married now. I avoided any such news, out of respect for that part of me that still aches. Which is all parts of me.

It’s not that I can’t share him. I shared him while he was completely mine, if that is ever a thing he would say he was. I think he might. The night in Rome when we stayed awake all hours, even when we walked hand-in-hand with other people, it was all him. His hand in mine. His breath in my ear. He was always just ahead or just behind. 

He still is.

He’s married now.

Sometimes I stumble the words out late at night, testing their veracity and weight. Does it shift off my chest to have them come out? If I share them with the empty room that was once his?

This is already too much about Oliver. These thoughts, this summer, this year.

I’m back in B. I’m working out a new adaptation of some Prokofiev. The strings soar through my headphones again, and I take my pencil in hand, fiddle it, turn over onto my side to write. Scribbles, notes. My guitar waits nearby. I should buy a mandoline, I think, or borrow one from Lorenzo’s shop. 

A sudden realization, like a stab: I haven’t been back to the berm. It would be incomplete, the waving grass reaching through the water towards the sky, sun raining through branches. The rays of light should slant against his skin. I want the arch of his neck in profile while he closes his eyes, leaned back on his hands, face upturned…

It’s a finished painting but missing any kind of focal point. Monet can have it back.

This isn’t like me. This rejection of things. One of the very things that attracted me to him was seeing this thing of me in him: this embrace of what’s in front of you, the question in his eyes and a genuine desire to hear an answer, to contribute, to be enveloped by the sea and every set of arms that opened to him. To me.

Mother’s worried about me. Father more so. He’s the one who warned me about this, about folding in on the pain and smothering it. But no amount of warning can intercept something like this.

He’s married now.

Headphones ripped off my head, I attempt to outrun him. Jump on my bike and coast downhill toward the piazzetta. It’s hard to outrun someone who lives in you, who pedals the very bike you’re riding, who’s run his hands up your legs and parted them so that you can still feel his weight settling, the sting of beard burn on your neck, yourself trembling beneath him… to feel these things even with the wind on your face. Especially then.

But there is no erasing, too, the beauty of B. The strip of shoreline that peeks out over the top of the next hill, through the wheaty waves of grass. Birds winging to trees, and the smell of salt and apricot wicking by my face.

I fly toward the acquisition of a mandoline, think about a melting gelato after, maybe a stop in the bookshop. Espresso and sitting with the noon regulars, talking about the next book signing. A leisurely ride home at sunset, through the orchards heavy with fruit and scent and insects, the start of evening.

I’ll read the new book I bought and oil the mandoline, and maybe we’ll have visitors and the _dinner drudgery_. No Hereclitus, no _Later!_ , no _If not later, when?_ and his gaze meeting mine and us becoming each other, feet overlaying one another in the underworld of shadow beneath the table. No more of that mythical moment made real when he doesn’t pull away and I don’t either.

I am rich with memories of him and so poor with his presence. What if I lose the memories too? I already don’t remember how he smelled just beneath his collar bone where I’d lay my head. It seems I recall everything else though, like a razor cutting through months.

I’m in town before I know it, my skin feeling cured under the intensity of the sun. My blood is magnetic, rising to the surface, toward the brightness, my pulse beating through the soles of my feet. Gelato first, I decide. 

I lick it from my lips—pistachio—and sit on a bench, soaking everything in. I vacillate these days, between opening and closing. I try to live in those open moments as much as I can, even when it feels like my heart is burning up inside my body. But right now, it only feels like the slide of cold pleasure into my belly, the sweat trickling down my neck. I can even, just for the moment, wonder what color suit he wore at the wedding and if he had, for even a second, a moment of doubt. Maybe not even about me specifically but about the kind of life he wants to have, me being a small, peach-sticky, Haydn-playing part of it.

But who am I kidding? I want to be every little thing, in everything he eats, touches, teaches, writes. _Cor Cordium._ Heart of hearts. If I could be anything, let me be that to him.

His fingers drifting along a piano as I play. A cigarette passed between us after sex. I’ll tickle, with my breath, my tongue, that spot in the middle of his bare back that makes him inhale that muffled sound. Time in separate rooms that still smell of one another. Drinks with friends and me serenading him under Roman stars that blur because of his luminescence, my drunkenness. Finding, always, that spot— _our spot_ —him opening me to his kiss and me not knowing when I started groaning my utter submission into his mouth, my leg around both of his again. 

Never again. And always. _Always._

 _They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying,_ You could have had this instead.*

Oliver.

With pistachio on my lips.

Oliver.

With blood pumping through my legs, strolling the piazzetta toward my mandoline.

Oliver.

My eyes on the stone, the trees, the buildings, the breaks between the buildings...

 _To look up and find you there, Oliver._ *

My life now is as much what-ifs as it is memories and the sound of my sandals slapping the cobblestones.

What if, Oliver?

What if _Oliver_?

~

**Parallel Lives—20 years later**

_“Can I ask you a question?”_

_“Shoot.”_

_“Would you start again if you could?”_ *

Questions from a year ago, time stolen in that bar, two martinis down and one to go, and here he is again. _Here_ again. Not New England in that booth, the certainty of our attraction pulsing like the scar from a phantom limb, like exploded stars from millenia ago, their light only now reaching Earth. He’s here. Italy. Home. He’s _home_ and yet leaving tomorrow, and all I can do is taste that martini going down, the truth coming out. He’s between Rome and Menton, and in between Rome and Menton is me, is us. The possibilities.

He remembers everything. Why is this shocking? That he is still me? Have I become less me with time? Why would he, if he was really me all along and I was him? Is there really anything at all resembling _not us_ anywhere in the world, but especially here?

We remember Vimini, Anchise… my father. 

“I can’t believe I have to remember him,” I say, Oliver leaned on the balustrade, me standing beside him, my hands in my pockets so that I don’t reach out and take his and try to make him, once more, mine—my lover, father, brother, as well as everything else he’s always been. I’ve needed him. But I don’t say as much. He’ll see it anyway. 

And then I blurt it, a lot like he did a year ago with his, “Can I ask you a question?” dropped like live ammunition between us: “Are you happy you’re back?”

Back. The word conveying a finality I want to whisk out of the air—and also let sit there, a prom proposal. I know I’m blushing.

“Are _you_ happy I’m back?”

My answer like water flowing from the source: “You know I am.”

“Me too.”

More after that. Some silences. Every word the realization of a promise I’d thought possibly broken between us.

Oliver remembers _everything_.

 _Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away._ *

I think about what I want from him, one last time, his own name from his lips while he’s looking inside the rooms of my soul and seeing himself living there.

I sleep fitfully that night, waiting to hear him approach my room and stand there wanting me. I wish for his want to drive him silently through the doorway, into my bed, into my body. Again, again, again. A brief rest, then his mouth descending onto my spent cock, getting it hard again. My hands in his hair like I need him in order not to fall off the world entirely.

He doesn’t come. He looks regretful over breakfast. Our feet stay under our own chairs. I scratch at my beard, having forgotten I have one. I’ve been seventeen again for the last several hours. I’ve been Oliver at twenty-four, the future of my life sprinting toward me irrevocably. 

I’ve been in my coma and he his. _Parallel lives_ he once said, not quite a correction. ‘Coma’ was his word before it was mine, after all. I think he just regretted it, the brutality of its truth, the cruelty of its lie—the fact that it could be, and was, both at once.

He carries his bag to the cab like a pallbearer.

 _Say it, say it, say it, please say it._ I can’t come out of the doorway, into the sun with him. If I come into the sun with him it would be _with_ him, into his arms, my mouth tilting up for him, parted open and shameless.

After all this time, do I still have shame? With him, I could have it and live through it, revel in it as well as everything else.

He touches the cab door, light, like fingertips on the petal of a flower.

And then it happens. His chin drops to his chest. I watch the air leave his ribs, his broad back deflating. He should be in Billowy, I think, and yet no one, not even Oliver, could ever pry it from my hands.

My heart stops in my throat at the turn of his head, the jarring voltage of lust his jaw provokes in me in that moment, throughout my life, just remembering it.

He turns to me, his bag dropping to the ground. He looks me in the face, holds my gaze, and then like a dream—like ‘you’ll kill me if you stop’—he says it. And he means it. And it seals us into forever.

“Oliver…”

~

**1984**

The mandoline waits at the counter for my lira. I browse the records, classical first and then whimsically veering into rock and pop. Italy holds the echoes of all voices in its stone, and if I can quiet my heart enough, I can still make out the ghost of ‘Love My Way’ from the piazza and an evening a year ago, as electric as a storm. I flip through the albums, smiling at nothing… at the Oliver who is now dancing in my mind’s eye.

He’s married.

I don’t care. He will always be dancing in my mind, permanent, unalterable. I will never eat a peach the same way again. I wonder if he stops in the middle of a lecture and recalls grasping my wrist as I attempted to stop him tasting it. I’ve seen Oliver blush once. I wonder if he does, when he remembers it.

I pull out a Psychedelic Furs album and begin reading the back, the tip of my thumb against my lip, bitten slightly. The opening door encounters the bell above and sends it tinkling. It’s a sound I’ve heard a million times, and yet it runs up my spine now like a premonition, like déjà vu.

A shadow blots out the sun and throws itself over my back, the shuffle of shoes going silent.

I know his steps still, and he waits there just as he waited outside my bedroom door before retreating to his own. I _know_ him, his smell, the way he breathes. And I know just as quickly that he would not have married only to so soon return here. To me. He wouldn’t have. Which means he didn’t. He’s not. 

_Everyone goes through a period of_ traviamento _—when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other_ via.*

I hear his breath behind me now, and I know he came here looking for me without any hope that I’d really be here. Have I felt unreal to him in this last year? Does he need to move me from imaginary figment back to flesh? Please, God, I want to be flesh for him!

I can no sooner close my eyes on that shadow, vibrating with potential energy, than I can stop myself loving him. But for just a moment, my gaze unfocuses, and the me I could have become in the future rifles through his memories—20 years of memories without him—and I see other lovers, other memories, removed lives, sometimes happy, fulfilling even. I see us separated by ocean basalts, carving centimeters more every year between his heart and mine. I see myself getting on a plane for some no doubt fabricated reason, but visiting him as though it’s impromptu. I see the lack of him within me filled up with just one glance.

I remember my very thoughts from a year ago when I confessed to him, in so many words, in that slippery way I succumbed to out of shame or shyness… that I wanted him. I remember my thoughts then: 

_In thirty, forty years, I’ll come back here and think back on a conversation I knew I’d never forget, much as I might want to someday. ...I’d stand here and ask the statue and the straw-backed chairs and the shaky wooden tables to remind me of someone called Oliver._ *

Relief, joy, indescribable. That I won’t have to. 

I let my breath back into my body, and with his name and then mine tingling on my lips, I turn around. 

 

~the end


End file.
